BOOKS

The Steppes Are The Colour of Sepia

​The Steppes Are the Colour of Sepia: A Mennonite Memoirinvites the reader to embark on a journey that traces the paths of ancestral memory over the steppes of the Russian empire to the valleys of Canada’s Fraser River. Connie Braun’s narrative continues where Sandra Birdsell’s historical fiction Russländerhas left off – back to the catastrophic events of twentieth-century Eastern Europe. Braun intimately ushers us into the life of one extended Mennonite family, and in particular the life of her father and grandfather, living under the terror of Stalin, and later, under the military expansion of Hitler’s Nazi regime in the Ukraine. In the vein of Janice Kulyk Keefer’s memoir Honey and Ashes: A Story of Familyand Anne Michaels’ Fugitive Pieces, Braun gives voice to the narrative of dispossession. In a memoir that is historically faithful to documents, letters, old photographs and personal testimony, Braun offers a lyrical second-generation witness to all those who have suffered displacement in history’s disasters, and whose obscure stories must be told. In doing so, she honours the spirit of resilience embodied by the refugees who have created and transformed Canadian society. The Steppes Are the Colour of Sepiais available through Ronsdale Press and Amazon.

"Connie Braun offers us fragments of family past that refuse to be forgotten: glimpses of happiness, shards of horror and exile. Her meditations...transform bits of memory into quiet, understanding beauty." - Rudy Wiebe

"This book is essential to any quest to make emotional sense of the displacement, dispossession, and holocausts of the last century." - Julia Spicher Kasdorf

"Connie Braun shows us how artful language can emerge out of a dialogue with silence and enables us to experience both grief and grace." - Greg Wolfe

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​"To seek meaning, to make sense of our world and our being in it, is the quest of narrative and why we construct it. Telling one another our stories is an innate human impulse, and, as narrative theorists claim, the distinct and defining quality of being human. As temporal beings grounded in time and space we long for relationship, connection and belonging in our world. The primordial human instinct is to seek to order chaos of our lives and to experience transcendence. In narrative we experience, as Paul Ricoeur states, the 'continued temporality' of a person which produces both."-- Connie T. Braun​